Department Faculty

Duane T. Wegener, PhD

Wegener received his PhD from Ohio State in 1994. After serving as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University for three years, he joined Purdue University in 1997 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 2003. He joined the Ohio State Social Psychology faculty starting in the summer of 2010. Wegener's research focuses on attitudes and persuasion, especially influences on the amount and nature of information processing and the consequences of the resulting attitudes for later thinking and behavior. His research also extends theories of attitudes and persuasion to related domains, such as stereotyping, impression formation, and judgment and decision making. In 2001, he received the American Psychological Association (APA) Early Career Award for distinguished contributions to the science of social psychology. Wegener is a Section Editor for the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and has been an Associate Editor for Basic and Applied Social Psychology and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He is also on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Research

Areas: attitude change, social cognition, and
quantitative methods.Interests: Attitude change/social cognition interests
especially address factors that influence the amount and nature of
informationprocessing. Specific programs of research have addressed effects
of mood and emotion, matching of message content to bases of attitudes,
attitude accessibility, attitude ambivalence, and values as influences
on information processing. In recent work, message
position moderates many of these effects. Related research
has also investigated the consequences information processing for persistence of beliefs and
attitudes over time and resistance to social influence (including extensions of
this work to the areas of judgment and decision making -- especially numerical
anchoring -- and stereotyping and prejudice). Much of the research in
attitudes and social cognition also focuses on the biases that can be created in
people's thoughts and perceptions and on the steps that people sometimes make in
attempts to rid their thoughts and perceptions of perceived biases.
Writing on the topics of research methods and quantitative (psychometric) methods has
included papers on construct validity (including multi-trait, multi-method analyses),
factor analysis, and covariance structure modeling.

Federal policy work: Roundtable discussant, National Science Board Task Force on Sustainable Energy, Berkeley, CA (2008); Written and oral testimony for 2007 U.S. House of Representatives hearing on "Contributions of the social sciences to the Energy Challenge," submitted to Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, Committee on Science and Technology. Written testimony available at http://science.house.gov/publications/hearings_markups_details.aspx?NewsID=1956

Blankenship, K. L., & Wegener, D. T. (2008). Opening the mind to close it: Considering a message in light of important values increases message processing and later resistance to change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 196-213.